During July 4-9, 1967, Lviv
hosted the Festival of Czechoslovakian and Soviet Youth Friendship that
attracted 400 Czechoslovakian young men and women. Hardly anyone remembers this
event 45 years later, but the festival received a lot of attention at that
time. It took place several months before the Prague Spring and a year before
an event that shocked the entire world – to keep Czechoslovakia in the
socialist camp, the Warsaw Pact troops (mainly Soviet ones) entered the
country. Now it’s difficult to determine what categories of young people
represented Soviet youth – most likely, those were Komsomol activists, students
from Lviv, and youth from other cities of the Soviet Union.

The program of the First
Festival of Czechoslovakian and Soviet Youth Friendship was full. As usual, the
festival opened with a ceremonial meeting at Lviv Opera Theater. It was hosted
by the Soviet Komsomol represented by First Secretary of the Central Committee
of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League Serhiy Pavlov as well as
Ukrainian and local Komsomol leaders. The festival’s honored guests included
Soviet cosmonauts – ‘cosmonaut #1’, Soviet hero Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, the first
woman in space Valentina Tereshkova, and Oleksiy Leonov.

On July 7, the newly
constructed Druzhba Stadium (now Ukrayina Stadium) hosted a large sports
festival. The stands of the then new stadium in Lviv had a seating capacity of
41,700 and were packed during the festival. The big space around the stadium
was turned into a park tapping into the natural landscape typical of Snopkiv.
The park was also named Druzhba. In
the 1990s, both the stadium and the park were almost destroyed because their
territory was used for a flea market. In the 2000s, the sports building was
reconstructed and resumed its original function. Due to the lack of systematic
care, the park became overgrown and lost its original appearance for good. The
same can be said of other parks in Lviv.

The First Festival featured,
among a multitude of other events, a seminar on youth sociology where Soviet
and Czechoslovakian sociologists discussed the problems of youth. The Czech
delegation included 7 participants most of whom were aspiring young
researchers, while the Soviet one was represented by eminent scholars and
associate professors from Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk, Lviv, Saratov, Sverdlovsk,
and Kyiv.